Chapter 22. Junior
We must have both had a look of panic on our faces, because Junior immediately grinned at us and told us not to worry.
“I’m not going to tell anyone I saw you together.”
Win looked very relieved, but he still had to go.
“Thanks, Junior. Denny, I’ll see you Monday in school.”
Win walked out, and Junior stood there grinning at me as Amy brought a coffee for him.
“You got a few minutes?” he asked me.
I just nodded.
“Amy,” he said, as he sat down on the stool Win had just vacated, “would you bring this young man another hot chocolate, please?”
She smiled at him as she walked off to make me another HC, and I realized, with some bitterness, that the way she smiled at Junior was very different from the way she smiled at me.
Junior looked very handsome in his blue police uniform, I had to admit. He was young, good-looking, and the friendliest man on the police force. He was the one who had seen us walking down Route 15 the day we came home and picked us up in his police cruiser. All the kids knew him by name, and he knew most of us, as well. He was the only cop in Essex who made any effort to get along with the kids.
In the week since we had come home, the police had tried to interview all of us, but had made little progress. All of our parents were very protective, and, since we weren’t accused of committing any crimes, other than truancy, the cops were limited in what they could do. One of the cops had come to our house one evening during the week and my parents let him question me for half an hour, but I had a ton of homework to do, so they wouldn’t let him stay any longer.
The cops wanted to know, of course, where we had been for the six weeks we had been missing. Had we run off with the carnies, as they had suspected at first? Had we gone to Greenwich Village, to find Alan Ginsberg and become Beatniks? Or were we hiding somewhere in Vermont? None of us had cracked under the questioning, so far, and all the “authorities,” as well as the news outlets, were frustrated at the lack of progress.
I was leery of Junior as we sat there. I liked him; all us kids liked him. But he was still a cop, and I had to protect my friends. So I just sat there and waited for him to talk.
He could tell I was nervous. “Don’t worry,” he said, “This isn’t an interrogation. I just thought we ought to have a little talk, off the record.”
I knew what that meant, from all the cop shows on television.
“Okay,” I said, “What do you want to talk about?”
He laughed. “As if you didn’t know. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking, and you can tell me what you think about what I’ve been thinking. Or not; it’s up to you.”
I said nothing.
“Okay,” he continued, “Here’s what I think. In all the time I’ve been here, and all the Champlain Valley Fairs I’ve been to, either as a police officer or as an ordinary citizen, the only times I’ve had any dealings with the carnies’ kids was after they’d beaten up some village kid. Not once have I seen those kids actually make friends with anyone from the village. They keep to themselves. Now, thinking back to the day when Sergeant Slingerland and I saw your buddy, Win, running to meet up with his new pal, whose father owned one of the game booths, I’m wondering. That little incident led us to believe, after you guys had disappeared, that you had become good friends with the carnie kids. But I’m thinking, that was pretty unusual.
“Thing is, all we really saw and heard was Win calling out that kid’s name and running behind the game tent. It might not have been what it looked like. It’s obvious now that your disappearance was planned in advance, and well planned, and I’m thinking, what if that was a ruse, a trick to send us off chasing the carnies when you guys had gone off somewhere entirely different?”
I was listening, but trying to maintain a stone-faced silence.
He waited just a bit, to see if I was going to say anything, then he went on. “Then, after we got nowhere with the carnies, Tom’s sister, Kelly, came through with her story about the Beatnik obsession, and that sent us off in another direction. It didn’t make much sense that twelve-year old boys from Essex Junction would get into that sort of thing, but, it was so scary, especially to your parents, that we had to follow up on it. The stuff we found in your rooms, the books and the poetry, scared the living daylights out of your parents, and the Chief, too. But, again, we got nowhere. So I’m thinking, this could all have been a deliberate false trail. Those books and notebooks could have been planted just to fool us. We know, from your teachers, that you were reading Kerouac, but those other kids? Doesn’t seem likely.
“The thing is, Denny, there’s a big difference in the two situations, and I want you to think about it. Sending us off chasing the carnies didn’t involve anybody else committing a crime; the carnies were fooled just as much as we were. But if Kelly deliberately gave false information to the police, and the FBI…”
Damn. My heart sank, and I’m sure my face did, too. I had thought I was so clever with my deception plan, but I hadn’t thought about the possible consequences for Kelly.
“What will happen to her?” I blurted out, “I mean, if…”
“Well, nothing’s decided yet. The Chief and the State’s Attorney are talking it over and deciding what to do. She’s a juvenile, so there’s only so much they can do, but, worst case, she could end up in Reform School. That is, if she can’t convince them that she didn’t know the information was false.”
A glimmer of hope. They had to prove that she was lying; that she deliberately deceived them. I was trying desperately to figure this out, with Junior staring at me the whole time.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.
“Simple,” he said, “You can end this anytime. Just sit down and give us a clear statement of what you did and where you went. I can guarantee that nothing will happen to Kelly if you do.”
“I don’t rat on my friends.”
“I know that. That’s why it has to come from all four of you, together. You guys talk about it.”
“Talk about it? How?”
“If you agree to consider it, I’ll get the Chief to talk to your parents, all of them. We’ll tell them that there’s a good chance we can solve this if you four are allowed to get together, like you always did.”
So that’s how the ban was lifted. Each of our households got a visit from a police officer later that day, or the next day, and our parents agreed to let us be friends again. It didn’t change anything at school, unfortunately, but we knew that situation would resolve itself. They could no longer stop us from walking to and from school together, so there wasn’t much point in keeping us apart at school.
Nothing really happened until the next Saturday. We had school, of course, and lots of homework, so our parents wouldn’t let us meet up until Saturday. Junior was keeping Chief Mulrooney at bay, at least for the time being.
We gathered early Saturday afternoon, October 31st, in the gully behind Tom’s house. The gully separated Pearl Street from Williams Street, and there was a path that ran from Tom’s back yard down through the gully and up to Williams, near where Win and Jimmy had lived before they moved to Hillcrest, on my side of town.
It was the first time we had been able to get together since we had left the police station after our “rescue,” and we hadn’t had a chance to talk to Rollo at all since the morning he had left the cabin, so there was a lot of laughing and joking and congratulating each other. We still had considerable hero status in school after two weeks back, and we were all loving it.
We had to hear Rollo’s story, and he loved telling it. Rollo was a guy I hadn’t known very well until that year, because he went to a different primary school, but he grew up in the Villa Drive neighborhood, so Win and Tom had known him a lot longer. The Ass King related his trip to Boston in Karl’s pickup truck.
“We had a great time,” he said, “It was the first time I ever said more than two words to Karl in my life, but we ended up getting along great.”
We all knew what he meant. Most of the younger kids were scared of Karl, except Win, and Karl reveled in his image as the scary “hood.”
“We listened to tunes on the radio all the way down, and he talked about the band he and his buddies were going to start up. Then he challenged me; he said you guys had told him I could fart on demand, no matter what time of day, or what I had eaten. He didn’t believe it. I proved it to him, no problem, and he couldn’t stop laughing.” He smiled smugly as we all laughed, and ripped one just to emphasize his point.
“He brought me right to the Greyhound Station in Boston, and he waited while I made the phone call. It was just like you guys said; my parents were so happy that they didn’t ask any questions. They dropped everything and drove down to get me. Karl said goodbye and drove off, and I sat there and waited. They started asking me questions on the ride back, but I didn’t tell them anything.”
The look on his face clearly showed how proud he was of himself, but that was okay. He had a right to be, and we were proud of him, too.
That night was Halloween, of course, and we had to talk about that. Being grounded, we had all missed out on the fun of “Cabbage Night.” With so many adult eyes watching our every move, it would have been hard to have any fun anyway. At twelve years old, we were at a transitional age; were we too old to go “Trick-or-Treating?” Rollo was going to go; there was no way he was going to miss out on all that candy. But his parents insisted that he go with his younger brother and sister. The rest of us were under strict orders to stay home and out of trouble.
We all talked about school, of course, and what we were going through, and it was only a matter of minutes before Miss Delisle was mentioned. Tom declared that she was the most beautiful woman in Essex Junction now, and possibly in the history of the village. We all agreed, although there was obviously no way to prove such an assertion. Win cast a sly grin at me, and suggested that I might have a different opinion. They all knew about my reverence for Amy Ducharme, and Win told them about the way Amy had treated us last Saturday.
They all made appreciative, but slightly mocking sounds, and Tom tried to throw cold water on my reverie.
“She’s a High School girl, Denny. She’s good looking, but Sally Delisle is a twenty-one year-old co-ed who might have stepped out of the pages of Playboy. There’s no comparison.”
Well, I wasn’t saying anything. They could think what they wanted; I had my dream tucked safely away where no one could touch it.
Now, the reason we had been allowed to get together was what I had promised Junior, so, at Win’s prompting, I had to repeat the entire conversation Junior and I had had at the Bake Shop. They were all impressed at the way Junior had worked things out, and as shocked as I had been at the suggestion that Kelly might be in big trouble. None of them had thought of that, either.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Tom said, “She hasn’t said anything to me about it.”
“Well,” I replied, “I think they probably haven’t actually threatened her with it yet; they’re waiting to see what we do.”
“What do you mean, what we do?”
So I had to finish telling them what Junior had said, that he could guarantee nothing would happen to her if we made a full statement about what we had done and where we had been.
The initial reaction was entirely negative; nobody wanted to reveal our secrets. But I had been thinking a lot about it, and, after a couple of minutes, I told them my thoughts.
“Listen,” I said, “it’s not just a matter of protecting Kelly, although that’s important. We’ve got to protect Jimmy and Larry and Roy, too, and especially Karl, because he’s old enough that they could really charge him. We can never reveal what he did for us. But as for telling the cops where we really were, let’s think about it; does it really matter anymore? We’ve done what we set out to do, and we’ve made our point. Does it matter now if people find out where we were? Can we get in any more trouble than we already have?”
That led to a lot of speculation and a lot of questions.
“What about all our stuff?” Rollo asked.
“Everything we used, and everything we left there, was stolen,” Tom pointed out. “Do we want them to find all of that?”
I was about to answer, but Win interrupted. “Uhh, update from Karl.” We all stopped talking and looked at him. “Karl told me last night that he and Larry have been out to the cabin twice, and they took everything away. All the tools; shovels, rakes, hammers, saws; the camp stove, the flashlights and lanterns. The only things left in the cabin are the cots and blankets and some cans of food and one kerosene lantern.”
This was a complete surprise to me, and I gaped at Win.
“Sorry,” he said, “I just found out last night and didn’t have a chance to tell you.”
“Where’d they put the stuff?” Rollo asked.
Win just spread his hands and rolled his eyes. Karl wasn’t going to tell anybody where he’d hidden the stuff.
“The cots and blankets,” Tom said, “It’s going to be obvious that we stole them, but how will they know for sure unless the church reports them missing and identifies them?”
“How would they identify them?” Rollo adds, “They’re US Army surplus; everybody has those things. My old man’s buddies have them in their fishing camps and deer camps. They’re everywhere.”
“What about all the wood that went into building the cabin?” Win asked. “Karl got that stuff from construction sites all over the county. How can anybody identify it and prove it was stolen?”
We went back and forth, talking about all this stuff, and trying to figure out what was the best thing to do. The thing is, we always expected to get caught eventually, in the cabin, so we wouldn’t be any worse off by telling the cops and showing them than we expected to be, and with the things that might be identified taken away by Karl, we would be a lot better off than if we’d been caught. That’s what we figured.
“So, how is this going to work?” Tom asked me. “Are we all going to go into the police station and talk, or are you going to do this yourself?”
“What Junior and I decided was that, if we agree to this, I will write up a statement, and all four of us will sign it.”
“What exactly are you going to say?”
“I will say that we built a cabin in the woods, behind the Tree Nursery, over the summer, we went to the Fair on the last day so people would see us there, and then we snuck off into the woods and stayed there for six weeks. And we did it all by ourselves, with no help. And I will offer to bring them to the cabin and show it to them.”
There was a moment of silence, then Tom started to laugh.
“Is that what they really want?” he said, “They’re going to look like utter fools when everybody finds out we were hiding less than three miles from the village while they searched all over the northeastern United States for us.”
“Well,” I said with a grin, “we’re not telling everyone. We’re just telling the cops; it will be up to them if they want to let the public know.”
So we all had a good long laugh over it, and decided we would go through with it.